Blogs and resources

On ADS-L, Fred Shapiro posted:

With the demise of the much-lamented “On Language” columns in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune [I think that modifier got displaced: “the much-lamented demise of the…”], what are remaining language columns in major newspapers or other media such as magazines, radio shows, or major blogs? Some that I know of include Boston Globe (Jan Freeman [and Erin McKean]), Visual Thesaurus (Ben Zimmer), and “A Way With Words” radio show ([Martha Barnette and] Grant Barrett).

to which I’d add (at least) Neal Whitman, Lynne Murphy, and John McIntyre. Plus Freeman/McKean and Barnette/Barrett, already mentioned. For the most part, writing about language in newspapers and magazines has been replaced by material on the web.

I’ve now assembled a huge list of web resources. Far from exhaustive, and focused almost entirely on blogs and reference resources in English, but here it is:

The Diacritics: thoughts on words (John Stokes and Sandeep Prasanna) [“about how we use language in daily life, recent socio- and psycholinguistics research, and ways we see language at work in current events”] (link)

I find it works either way for me. Can you not lament the thing lost as well as lament the loss? The OED says that `to lament’ is `to mourn for the loss of (a person); to bewail (an occurrence)’ and has citations for transitive `lament’ of both kinds.

In English, with [zw], in German with [tsv]. People tend to have trouble with initial [zw] in English and are inclined to “fix” the cluster in various ways, usually by devoicing the [z] or by inserting a schwa to break up the cluster, but sometimes by just deleting the [z] or even by postponing the [w] until after the [k]. (I did a Language Log posting on this long ago.)

When I say my name to new people, I tend to produce a very long fully voiced [z], in the hopes of getting a [z] back in their pronunciation and a Z in their spelling.

Chuckle. Periodically I post links from this blog to my X blog — most recently in “Sexy stuff on my X blog” (here). There’s only so much discussion of gender and sexuality matters (and men’s underwear etc.) that I feel I can inflict on readers of this blog. And of course some of the images are unWordPressable, and some of the material (poetry, fiction, fictobiography) is a bit strong for many readers of this blog.

2. Language on the move by Ingrid Pellar and others “sociolinguistics research site devoted to multilingualism, language learning and intercultural communication in a transnational world” — http://www.languageonthemove.com/

I’m honored to be included, Arnold! Here’s another blog for your consideration: Ben Trawick-Smith’s Dialect Blog, “a place for hobbyists, actors, linguists and curiosity-seekers to learn about and discuss the dialects of the English language.” http://dialectblog.com

I’d like to add Borderless Learning. For now, it’s a page on FB and Twitter, but it will be a blog starting this summer. The primary focus is bilingualism and bilingual education, but anything interesting and language-culture related is fair game.

I don’t often check the stats of my blog (too discouraging) but I had an extra glass of wine and was feeling adventurous…and I noticed a spike in readership recently, which can be traced to your mention here. Thanks for the shout-out. We language nerds need to stick together.